Upgrading My Computer

Isn't it cheaper to buy a new one and flog yours on ebay?

[maviczap]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Isn't it cheaper to buy a new one and flog yours on ebay?

Where's the fun in that

I prefer not to have a computer loaded with bloatware I don't need or use

[andrewsmith]

Originally Posted by Seggons

Are they not even worth the lack of boot up time they offer? I was given one of those Asus eepc thingys and the boot up time of that is mega quick. As for the RAM I can always add to that since I have spare slots when the time comes.

There wont be that much to sell from the old system. Some old RAM, an old E6600 with stock heatsink and that's about it. I prefer to keep the hard drives and use as backups or something.

Furry muff

My experience is with the Mac Book air and SSD's and they were silly money over a std super compact HD

I have 2 SSd's striped in raid zero and they make the computer boot up quick. I use them for my OS and the system is snappy. If i was upgrading your PC i'd just throw in the quickest quad you can get and the most ram the board will take for video. You might wanna raid a few normal HDD's for a scratch disk too to speed things up.

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Isn't it cheaper to buy a new one and flog yours on ebay?

Possibly if I was actually starting from totally new. I'm keeping the sound card, graphics card, PSU and hard drives so it doesn't leave much to sell. I did price up a new computer but it worked out at just over £1,000. So I thought it would be a little bit cheaper just to upgrade the parts that I need to.

Originally Posted by andrewsmith

Furry muff

My experience is with the Mac Book air and SSD's and they were silly money over a std super compact HD

To be honest I am being a bit foolish buying a SSD now because the prices are always going to fall. It wasn't long ago when 1TB hard drives were mega expensive.

Originally Posted by Jackie_Black

I have 2 SSd's striped in raid zero and they make the computer boot up quick. I use them for my OS and the system is snappy. If i was upgrading your PC i'd just throw in the quickest quad you can get and the most ram the board will take for video. You might wanna raid a few normal HDD's for a scratch disk too to speed things up.

If I was going to go down the route of putting in the quickest quad core it would bring the price up to £625. That's bringing it just shy of the i7 setup.

If the Intel Core 2 Quad is as quick as the Intel Core i7 950 then it would make it worth while. But if there is more performance in the i7 then surely it would be better to go the i7 route?

I'm tempted to throw another £40 at the i7 setup and go for the Asus Sabertooth X58 Socket 1366. After reading some reviews of the cheaper boards they seem a bit hit and miss. The Sabertooth seems to be coming out quite well in reviews so far.

Quickest quad is about £220 atm. If you have a dual core now and encode a lot of video you are going to notice a serious difference in processing. Ditching vista will help too cos its ****e. You could do serious ram, cpu and hdds for about £400. I too suffer from building serious PC's. My current one is an absolute *******. Some of the best improvements I've made have been to HDD's. stripe a few HDD's and use the stripe as a video editing disk and it will speed the system up a lot. HDD's are a serious bottle neck.

Originally Posted by maviczap

Where's the fun in that

I prefer not to have a computer loaded with bloatware I don't need or use

Suppose it depends if building computers comes high on your 'fun' list

Personally sex, motorbikes, and playing games with my son all come much higher on mine

You can always uninstall the bloatware.

[maviczap]

Originally Posted by -Ralph-

Personally sex, motorbikes, and playing games with my son all come much higher on mine

I still have time for those sorts of things as well

[Ruffy]

Maybe I'm missing something here: If your main use is going to be rendering and video editing (all graphics intensive), why are you not seeking to upgrade your video card? Surely that's the bit that's going to do the work.

Originally Posted by Jackie_Black

You could do serious ram, cpu and hdds for about £400.

The closest I can get is just over £600 with the quickest quad core. http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/3285/basketn.jpg

Would I notice even more of a difference if I put £50 more towards it and get a i7 setup? Or is that quad core equal to an i7 CPU?

Originally Posted by Ruffy

Maybe I'm missing something here: If your main use is going to be rendering and video editing (all graphics intensive), why are you not seeking to upgrade your video card? Surely that's the bit that's going to do the work.

When I say rendering I mean video rendering and not 3DMax rendering. As far as I've seen so far Sony Vegas is mainly CPU and RAM intensive. Normally when my video card has to do any work the fan normally spins up and makes lots of noise. So far when using Sony Vegas the GPU fan has not kicked in once.